


i feel so nice, mom i feel so nice

by blackestofmarkets



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, F/M, Gen, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 12:58:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12458295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackestofmarkets/pseuds/blackestofmarkets
Summary: There will always be fire.There will always be destruction and maelstroms and sandcastles crumbling.But they do not live for brimstone and hellfire.They live for the quiet moments in between.





	i feel so nice, mom i feel so nice

 

**6225 days to the vote.**

 

Against all romantic illusions and common perceptions, they meet neither at a gala nor at a premiere. The illusory sheen of Hollywood’s guilefully named _small town affectation_ falls away very quickly under the sheer mass of the industry. She’s a writer and a mystic, he’s a narrator and a cynic. They don’t run in the same circles. She is as unaffected by the ebb and flow of the entertainment circus as he relishes it. Therefore until one day in late October, when the leaves on the massive, brittle willow in front of her roadside window are speckled with brown spots, their paths have yet to cross.

 

Her house is situated on the cusp of Adironrack, far enough out from the busy bustle of Portland to quench the need for visits with a rocky, halting car ride of fourty minutes. It’s precisely what she envisioned and it is precisely why she is so uncongenially surprised when at five past one the doorbell goes off. The house is new, paid off by her grandmother’s inheritance, and the shrill ring is a harsh dissonance to the silence residing in those white, sweeping floors, smothering any and every sound. Except the one she can’t avoid. The only person she allows to, her editor, has a key and she is unrepentantly, gladly devoid of any other intrusion into her home. Neither her therapist half-hearted suggestions of vague pareidoliac symptoms somewhere buried in several hundred pages of 1997’s _DSM_ , nor her mother’s vague prodding, somewhere meeting in a radical center between precocity and goodwill, have ever swayed her. She has never minded people per se, but the harbingers of disturbance that appear in their wake is something she can’t deny being averse to.

 

The doorbell rings again and she sighs, pushing her chair back with perhaps more force than strictly necessary. But she is two paragraphs and one sentence into the beginning of the third chapter and as the literary world is well aware of, beginnings are always the hardest to formulate. It’s easy enough to go along once one has found a modicum of thread to sling themselves along. Somewhat more difficult proved what her literature professor at Cornell, wizened eyes and leathered skin combined with the disposition of a true pre-1960s hippie, had ambiguously named the _flow_ in an attempt to appeal to the sub-twenties majority in the cramped, cannabis-wisped classroom. She, well into the latter half of that decade and a wholly different  career under her proverbial belt, had penned down a singular and decidedly expressive **bullshit** into her notebook.

 

As such, she doesn’t take kindly to disruptions, not when the novel is at the crucial stage between halfway on its way to a defined and still toddling around aimlessly. Her regret is not palpable when she discovers the two symmetric scuff marks left by her ascension, two perfect parallels leading towards its hindlegs, but it’s still existent. It doesn’t do a stellar job of warming her to her unidentified visitors, if it has a purpose at all. Rose Lalonde, allegedly making common cause with the occult, feels unexpectedly non-teleological at times. But even with the creeping in her heart pragmatism is her first and foremost order.

 

On her way down, she trails a hand along the banister, smooth white wood like water under her fingers. The paintings of garish wizard which she adores with unbridled nostalgia are mirrors in the early noonish sun and she ascertains once, twice to avert her face. It’s too early in the day to face reflections, not when she is already irritable and her patience is in short supply. A glimpse of white on black on white from the last glass pane and she thinks if she were to come across Bethsaida and its hungry crowds, she would not have enough bread and fish to feed her disciples. It is only upon the third shrill of the doorbell, shorter than before, that she opens the door to two men.

 

One of them she knows, the other she only has a faint remembrance of and no tangible explanation as to where and why. And since she has never been prone to re-enacting Anne Rice novels, she spares him barely a glance before addressing her literary agent. He is small, unsuccessfully no longer bald and sweating profusely, though it remains unspecified whether that is cause of the strenuous car ride or both the other man’s and her own blank expression.

“Andrew,” she says, modulating her voice into a timbre of not displeased welcome. It’s not hard to build up, despite his misgivings she does like him.

“What has brought this on? I thought we mutually decided on refraining from expediting the process.”

 

He looks appropriately chastised and she squashes down a vague tendril of guilt for the way the stains peeking out from his armpits seem to grow even more. But if she is to choose one cliché, she’d gladly hang her cap on the one regarding the reclusiveness of writers. His companion does not seem to mind very much, from the way he inches from one leather sole to the other, shifting his way towards the shadowy side of the porch. Andrew apologizes for his – their – intrusion, something about calling her and only reaching the mailbox, only in much more words. He introduces the second man and something about that name strikes a note in her, be it from the magazines at her hairdresser or the half-lucid dreams (she dares not name them what they are, not yet when 3-11 is still half a decade away) between two and four in the morning.

 

“I have to say, I am curious as to the reason behind your presence,” she says.  
At his expression she corrects herself with the placidity of the fencer she used to be. Wait, then strike.  
“Though I have an inkling of an idea.”

Without missing a beat, he lifts his head for the first time from where he’s intently studying the black marble columns next to the entrance. “Without those, this whole shindig would probably topple like some particularly ill-constructed Jenga tower left in the care of a two-year old,” he comments idly. His voice is higher than she expected, for all that is more than a few inches taller than her. It’s slightly nasal too, as if he’s recovering from either a sinusitis or a broken nose. And yet, something about him. The overlapping circles of presque vu and déjà entendu slip through her ribcage and weigh her diaphragm down like a pendulum swinging in endless ellipses.

 

There is no grand revelation when finally looks at her – _really_ looks at her – but she can’t help but whiteknuckle through the frisson that visibly runs through him, sweeping him from slightly scuffed leather shoes to ridiculously coiffed sidesweep. Between Andrew’s half-aborted attempt at an explanation, anything to smooth the situation and the way he looks at her, as if she’s something half-mythological, half-human, as if he can’t decide whether she’s Klotho to spin his thread or Atropos to cut it, she can’t help it. The smile steals itself on her face like a thief in the night and as she steps aside to let the two of them in she notices the slight tremor of his right thumb. He’s not nervous, but it’s a close thing.

She will turn his offer down. Of course she will turn his offer down, to Andrew’s barely disguised shock and his laissez-faire acceptance. _Complacency_ was never meant to be made into a movie, much less by him. For now, this is enough. Shaking hands and a presence a few feet away from her, his gaze fixed between her eyes and the scar on her chin, flicking up to look at her mouth every few minutes with a mixture between mystification and astonished tolerance.  The barely concealed beat of saccades and the thrum under his skin that pierces his arteries and trickles into his bloodstream.

When she watches them leave through her window, the sun has wandered a red mile from where she is sitting at the desk and he does not turn around. But she knows he will return.

 

That night, she _knows_. She _sees_.

 

* * *

 

**4745 days until the vote.**

 

The door snicks shut with a violent shudder from where she is half-bent over in front of the mirror, one hand tugging her earlobe down to insert one of the earrings she inherited into the hole. The click it produces upon its closure is resounding enough to attract his attention, his head raising in the same sharp manner she has seen birds do, staccato enough to aggravate his already throbbing head. She’ll do both of them the favour and refrain from bringing the cognitive dissonance his actions and mental state to his mind. If he’s aggrandized enough to not quite slam the door when he’s already worked himself into this state, her commenting on it will not further the conundrum he seems to be in.

 

Usually, she does not have to wait long and this time is no exception. Just as he is prone to distracting her from her occasional black moods with interesting to inane talk about his day, his method of coping consists of a torrential amount of both pacing and complaining. She watches him through the looking-glass from her proverbial ivory tower, the black satin of her dress rustling as she puts the remaining earring in. She has more, could buy more, but with the slow shift of a political avalanche positioning itself, both of them invest the money towards friends and acquaintances, spinning a careful, thread-thin web of contacts. He doesn’t like to say it, but she knows he thinks _allies_ with the same dogged determination he applies to his masterpieces. SBaHJ is a neverending machine and he is the one behind the wheel, oiling every single cog. When he isn’t on set, he’s contacting video streaming services with his ostensible demands and when he isn’t setting up the donation of money for buying certain movies or fixing seemingly meaningless prices, he is cranking out more and more merchandise.

He has ulcers these days, even though he won’t tell her. The not quite comfortable curl of his body in the shower is enough of a telltale sign, the pantoprazole in his cigarette case rattling every time he puts his suit jacket on. She lets him. She has plenty she doesn’t tell him either and neither of them are especially fond of overt expressions: she in any and every way, he in most of them.

 

By the time he has substantially calmed, it’s late enough to skip a late lunch and just go straight to dinner. Los Angeles is loud and dirty, not to mention the opinions of its inhabitants. But she is willing to overlook the small minority consisting of two juggalos – belonging to a party who grandly styles itself ICP – recently voted into the House of Representatives for the option of a decent dinner she does not have to order or make herself. But come summer, she will be glad to return to her quiet, cool glade over a glacier. Of course, she will miss him terribly, but he knows that already, so she wastes no breath on it.

“I think the names are in no way ridiculous and entirely appropriate to the spirit behind your franchise,” she says finally after the silence has weighted the room down like a lead gown, and the look he gives her is between pointedness and gratitude, a pinprick appreciation. For all the stinging she provides, she is more than willing to take some herself. She is rarely as soft as he deserves, by nescience more than impassiveness.

“I’m at least glad _someone_ ain’t pulling a Sinatra on me and tells me something along the lines of this town being a make-you or break-you town,” he grouses, though it’s more half-hearted than it is truly upset. The line of his shoulders isn’t as rigid and when he finally kicks his shoes off, the last trace of animosity towards people who do not, in his words _get it_ is relieved as well. It’s not the malice Dave suffers, it’s the apathy.

“If I have one more snot-nosed little arts design student fresh outta UCLA telling me capitalizing the names of the merch is a surefire way to ending up along the likes of Elvis and Guy Fieri with that B.C. capital bull to the shit, I’m gonna ram my loafer so far up their Versace-cocooned ass they won’t even be able to say _profit margin_.” He pronounces B.C. more along the lines of _Baee Caee_ and she don’t know why, but for some reason it’s terribly, irrationally endearing.

When he turns around, she has resumed her previous posiion at the vanity table, applying a layer of fresh lipstick and frowning when it bleeds into the tiny, imperceptible folds around her mouth: the envoy of first wrinkles. Of course she’s listening, but even at his most histrionic moments, he is nothing but observant. From across the room watches her for a second, then vanishes into the kitchen. For a few moments, there’s nothing but clanking glasses and the pouring of liquid slightly less dense for it to be water. The fizz of a bottle and then he’s back with two martini glasses, balancing the cocktail sticks between his teeth. They both abhor olives.

She concedes to his olive branch sans olive by putting her hairbrush down and crossing her legs to balance her glass on one of them. “I agree that both **SORD** and **BORD** are perfectly acceptable names. Not to mention the intrinsic value their _pars pro toto_ identical structure holds,” she says, not able to hide her smile behind her glass fast enough. Her lipstick leaves perfect black marks on the rim, she should have waited before drinking. But it’s worth seeing the way he almost swallows the little wooden cocktail stick, coughing into his morosely expensive shirtsleeve before straightening from his half-bent position to pull his phone out.

Seeing this all too familiar ritual, she half turns to take a sip from her drink, adjusting her watch. In the half-twilight of the room, it looks even more than a Daliesque painting, melting face and skewered hands bleeding all over her wrist. It’s one she has a curious fondness for, even if it is merely because he gave it to her for her thirty-fifth birthday. His explanation at the time had sounded curiously rehearsed, but she had still appreciated the gesture. Quid pro quo, if he believes in what she has taken to call _visions_ and he calls, half-fondly, half-mockingly _wytchkraft_ , she is not averse to accepting his skewed perspective of time and its flow. As much as she’d like to dig into this particular topic, get her metaphorical hands so far into his chest cavity that they’d emerge bloody, this is one of the topics on which he does not like to pushed. So she stills and cedes, which is as unfamiliar to her as a genuine interest in his half-, quarter-, and eighth-baked ideas is to him.

From the corner of her eye she sees something flash, then again, brighter. It is accompanied by a muffled curse, the word _camera_ the only audible sound reaching her before her eyes slide shut in a slow-motion mockery of his previous expression. The flash appears again, this time right before her eyes and she _knows_ it’s not real, that it couldn’t be so close. Yet it reappears, growing bigger and bigger until her vision is a blinding white with dark tendrils at the edges. Horror would be the apt word to use in this situation. The tendrils begin to move, to stretch out and pull back and the center of her vision, closed off to anything behind her eyelids gets brighter. Brighter. Brighter until it is blurring into colour, until her retinae are burning and her ears are popping.

Logically, knows her words are forming lips, but someone, something has sealed her behind her lids and she is defenceless against the slow slide of her body, gravity taking its dues whilst she feels something faintly damp trickle against his mouth. She has no time to ponder whether it is tears, mucus or blood before the tendrils ball up, thicken and shoot right through the center into her eyes.

She must have screamed at some point, because the last thing she feels is her mouth opening and her throat vibrating, but then blessed darkness dampens her conscience until she is slipping away into the many-eyed embrace of the Ancient Ones.

 

When she comes to, the first thing she is aware of is a steady throb in her mouth, as if she swallowed a boiling hot cup of water. It spreads through the roof of her mouth, travels down the row of her teeth and cumulates at the tip of her tongue. As she calls upon her body, she finds it slow and unresponsive. Only after a few moments of uneasy floating, close to slipping back into that many-armed cage does she pry open her eyes. The shapes above her are blurry and her gaze is unfocused, wandering along what appears to be the ceiling.

There’s a rustle besides her and a sharp curse. “Fuck, fuck me sideways with something sharp, salted and serrated. Hold on a second, Pythia, I gotcha.”  
A further rustle, something heavy scraping over a surface and then her glasses are carefully placed on her face. For all he acts the class clown at times, his hands are steady and gentle as he props her up a little, crouching in front of her so she doesn’t have to turn her head.

Slowly, the world comes back into focus again and with it the pain. When she wipes her nose and chin, she is unsurprised to find blood. What conquers her attention is how _much_ there is. From his expression, he’s of the same opinion.

“You were bleedin’ like a stuck pig,” he explains with the sort of humour in his voice that is usually reserved for their dire political situation. His hands are rust-tinged and there are tissues besides him on the bed she only now realizes he must have carried her to. “Thought it was something coming from the inside. I wouldn’t hold it beyond those tentacle verschnitt eyegobblers to actually fuck you up in there.”

At that, she manages a laugh, the corners of her lips twitching up. He sags and only now does she realize how tense he’s holding himself, hovering over her like she’s going to spout another fountain of blood if he touches her. There’s no guilt in her thoughts, because this is sadly no fantasy novel, but she does wish he wouldn’t fuss so much, which she promptly tells him. His reaction is somewhere between an aborted snort and a roll of his eyes, the ombre of his pupils even visible through her blurry vision.  
“Woulda, coulda, shoulda and all that equally mediocre, yet overtly prized jazz. I ain’t serving up a Miles Davis here, you’re gonna Michel Petrucciani’s left leg and you’re gonna like it.”

 

Abruptly, he falls quiet again, eyeing her with barely concealed uncomfortableness. There is no need for her to ask, not when the beat on her wrist and the beat under his skin are solitarily united in their synchronization. All it needs is her hand grazing over his knee, a silent, yet not entirely unfond reminder of their task. When he nods, pinched face and set jaw, she wonders how anyone could ever find him hard to read. He is engrained in her psyche like a burning brand, every tic and pattern like smouldering ashes set over her mouth and nose.  
“Said some weird shit,” he finally says. Visibly unhappy. But never has he hesitated and she is not altruistic enough to convince herself it’s not because of their shared thrall over each other.  
“Something about three times eleven and a hill. And then just. Red.”  
Upon her quiet, gaze, baring him as solidly as she has ever been able to do it, he shrugs.  
“Whole lotta red, you wouldn’t stop, well. Fuckin’ screaming your head off.”

 

When she doesn’t respond, he finally stretches out on the bed besides her, fingers curled against the hollow of her shoulder. It’s unclear which of them grounds it more. Who needs it more.  
“What’s that mean? You had those dreams—or visions before, but never in broad daylight, never to this level. Shit, you were bleeding so bad I was thinkin’ of calling an ambulance.”  
He’s just talking now, filling the air with words so she doesn’t have to. But eventually, even his stream of conscience narration runs dry and he waits. So terribly exhausted, so terribly weak. Dave Strider, man of no morals and no limits and _she_ is his Achilles heel, the blind spot in his vision. It’d be comical if she wasn’t acutely aware of her own softness for him.

 

“It means,” she says, finally. Her voice is tired and rough from misuse and the blood she swallowed, but Dave’s eyes are fixed on hers only, never straying to her mouth or nose or the drying sweat on her forehead.  
“It means that we’re in dire need of a strategy. A plan.”

 

* * *

 

 

**4744 days to the vote.**

 

They wait for her on the hill above the Hollywood sign. It’s terribly cliché and all very faux-mystic, but he does not complain. Instead, they both dress up to the nines, taking a cab out of the city until they are close enough to walk. The **BORD** is still in its developmental phase, he says, almost apologetically if she didn’t know he doesn’t do apologies, can’t take that. So they walk the three miles up to the highest point in silence. And then they wait.

In November the sun is slow to rise, but even at 11:11 AM the rays are weak, yet visible. The sun is so low in the sky that they are almost blinded by it. Almost miss the red **_it_** peeling out of the sun’s shadow, approaching them and the city behind them like a particularly fat, engorged fly. Almost miss her.

But flies aren’t red.

Besides her, he takes the sudden appearance of the ship in. If she were to turn, she would see his thumb twitch. It is only when smaller dots on the horizon split off  from the ship, divert their course into all directions is that he finally speaks.

“ _Bitch_ ,” he says resoundingly.  
She finds she agrees.

 

* * *

 

 

**2920 days to the vote.**

 

It’s election day and the ICP gains more seats.  
More representatives for the House.  
Fieri tries and fails to enters the senate.

He laughs when she is unable to unclench her jaw. Those? he asks. Never, he says. Stop being paranoid, and the disbelief freezes her to the bone. They fight. It’s ugly, because the silence rings so loud when you refuse to shout.

She leaves for her house at the edge of Adironrack after that  
They keep their radio silence for three or so months (three months, fifteen days and somewhat around eight hours) before he walks into her bathroom whilst she’s showering, key dangling from his finger.

“Mind if I join you,” he says. But his eyes are jittery and for the first time in a long while, his whole hand twitches.

She doesn’t send him away. She doesn’t think she could.

 

* * *

 

 

**1460 days to the vote.**

 

Fieri makes senator.

Dave doesn’t laugh this time.

 

* * *

 

 

**999 days to the vote.**

 

He buys a bottle of champagne and they spend their evening on the rooftop of his apartment, chugging Moët and spitting sunflower seeds onto the heads of anyone they see dressed in Crocker red. They’ve been adults for a long time and old for an eternity. She calls it a controlled rebellion and he laughs so wildly he almost falls off his chair.

There’s not a lot to laugh at afterwards. The days blur into each other, calendar page after calendar page heaping up in her office bin until she finally tugs it outside with violent strength. She surprises herself by almost getting angry. Her teeth are bared and there’s something strange bubbling up in here, but she squashes it down ruthlessly and sits down to revise her fifth book, crossing through entire pages until he barges into her office and starts picking them out of the trash. Tells her she’s too smart to delude herself such. For once, she doesn’t have anything to reply to that, not even silence.

They work. It works.

It doesn’t really.

 

* * *

 

 

**323 days to the vote.**

 

Their expansion works, at least within the entertainment community. There are enough spurned artists that despise The Fork™, even if there’s no end of him crossing out names with her favourite inkwell pen with a drawn brow. Eventually she gives him one of his own pens, merchandised to supply whole spurts of ink at one minute and then dry out in a second’s worth of time. She finds it does the trick, at least well enough to save her Caran d’Ache pens. She might not give a single shit (language, he reverberates in her head like a well-used favourite toy, wrinkled and endlessly fond, _we don’t this type of motherfucking language in this goddamn house_ ) about her jewelry, but desperate times require desperate measures and she’s not willing to sacrifice the proverbial relics of her livelihood and profession.

Their dinner is interrupted by both of their phones blowing up and for a moment his squint at the screen, eyes weakened with the fading light and both of their ages, is laughable. Then he looks up and sucks his lips in in the way that means he’s trying not to bite them, because he’s long past that age and Rose curses in a language so black even she doesn’t know it.

House is bad, Senate is worse. U.S. Supreme Court is a level even the Elder Court behind her lids did not anticipate.

When she is sleeping, she feels the slide of their tendrils over her corneae and only his newfound tendency to work at the desk in her bedroom keeps her from drifting, the steady click and roll of a mouse against wood enough to buoy her.

 

* * *

 

 

**56 days to the vote.**

 

He only asks once. It’s enough.

She tells him no before the question has even fully left his mouth, even if it’s against her usual habits of always leaving him room to speak.

He smiles then, bowing his head in a nod, but it doesn’t look like a smile at all.  
She doesn’t feel like smiling either.

 

* * *

 

 

**Fourteen hours to the vote.**

 

They, in a heady rush of what her better conscience tells her is a dangerous tightrope walk over the abyss of a hot-hand bias, decide to go out. Between dinner at possibly the last restaurant the Crockerstablishment has not gobbled up yet and ice cream he fetches from a nearby Burger King, cradling the slightly wobbly plastic cups in between his tux and is hands, leaving melting traces on the velvet, they consume a less than respectable amount of alcohol. The air is singing with the coming day, a thrum of tension in the atmosphere and none of them forget.

An unidentified and somewhat blurred amount of time later they are swaying to low-quality music off his phone in the ballroom of an abandoned hotel. The management has long since left for Europe and the hotel is in a state of panicked abandon. Their shoes are caked with dust from climbing through up the fire ladder and through the kitchen exit, but still they turn and turn until they are both dizzy and Dave has white lips and even redder eyes than normal.

 

The soft croon of _slow dancing in a burning room_  envelops the two of them in the kind of velvety haze a certain degree of alcoholism is shadowed by. His eyes, not for the first time, are brusquely soft, burnished wood fizzling out into embers, eyelids drooping heavily over his sloped jaw and beaked nose. He looks _old_ , for lack of a more flattering term and both of them have never been less than frighteningly candid with each other. She looks at him and thinks of her own expression at six in the morning, wearied and crumpled from sleep and from the rising tide of the horrorterrors and thinks _you fool, you thrice-damned fool_. Whether she means him or herself is unclear even to herself.

 

Still, she does not let go, starkly white knuckles around the lapels of his suit, his own hands tracing a meaningless beat against the bottom of her ribcage, _three-four, three-four, two-four_ reverberating up her ribcage and into the thrum of her heart. Not for the first time, but with something sharp, prickling like gorse in her palms she notes, as clinically as she can allow herself, that perhaps he needs her more than she needs him. His need for her is something wrathful and gluttonous, gorging himself on 135 format film, capturing her in 36x24 on silver halide crystals. Or perhaps _need_ is the wrong verb, because her assurance of Dave’s capabilities reaches beyond what even she could manifest in between stopper fluid and fixer. He could live without her, even be content without her, of that she has no scruples. His denial of that fact is as vicious as it is deeply rooted, even after decades of quiet, twofold solitude. Doubtlessly the general public, what little is left of it in any way, assumes they are _made_ for each other of them in the way the ocean is made for sand. They think of their lives as waves crashing over rough corners, smoothing rocks into cobbles, cobbles into pebbles.

 

The air is heavy with an analogy about trees rooting themselves into the same spot, branches intertwining into sharp brambles and she’s, if not dying, then leisurely intrigued in regard to his possible reaction. He is, as always, a veritable Pandora’s Box, though she has become as adept at reading him over the years, as he has become at knowing when to leave her. What she does not anticipate is the surge of mild distaste she experiences at the spiking thought of relinquishing that part of him. Not losing, no. Giving it up.

But as always, as is stark black on white, neat at the end of every book she publishes: _but what really happened is up to you, dear reader_. Still – or perhaps because she can allow herself after those years – she does not let go. She doesn’t think she could for the world.

 

At this moment, his hands rise to fit themselves under the slopes of her angular shoulderblades, his chest expanding in the kind of half-breath he affronts to fill the silence. “Don’t tell me you’re getting sentimental in your old days,” he says. Her laugh is as bright as the silver bells over the door and she is, as she is every time, amazed it’s for the most part sincere.

“I would feed you to the Elders with no hesitation,” she says.

“I know,” he replies, and when he leans down to kiss her, it’s much less than fear and much more than reverence.

 

* * *

 

 

**Six hours after the vote.**

 

They watch the proceedings together on the very same sofa she declined his offer to adapt _Complacency_. It had been the end of October, she thinks with the same clinical detachedness she gives the outpouring of faygo and excessively foul freestyle rap. It has almost been seventeen years and another decade is sure to come. If she had champagne, she would offer him some, welcome the new year and a new, mirthful world in an equally as mirthless toast. Her wine is bitter when it hits the back of her throat and Dave’s fingers strum _one, one, one_ around the neck of his beer bottle. It’s a new beat. Focused. In a way, it saddens her more than the aghast faces of the moderate party showin flickering on the screen before it cuts back to painted faces and hysterical crowds.

 

Then, imperceptibly he turns his head and she knows he saw her nostrils widen, her jaw set.

“My dear,” she says with all the gentle levelness she can muster. It is more soft than he deserves right now, evident by the way his hand clench against the fabric where it nearly touches her forearm. To remain stoic in the face of this is a mirage in its own right, but it fades against the slogan of _motherfucking miracles_ spit at them through the television.

Both of them are frozen on the sofa and his thumb twitches, like it had done almost six thousand days ago. But he does not shake.

“Of course we will,” she says.

On the screen, the results of the vote neatlessly transition into an inauguration unlike any other and when Fieri pulls his pants down and squats in an unmistakeable position, Dave surges forward to switch the television. His upper lip is curled up in what she recognizes as the expression he used to give those who took his movies seriously.

 

Funny, how little things change, yet how much has shifted over those. She’d laugh if she could get her mouth to open.  All this shift and yet no change and their tectonic plates are not quite there yet. It is the only thing to propel her into motion as she stills him with a hand right over that twitching thumb, her own finger pressing into the groove where bone meets tendon.

“Of course we will,” she says, again.

This time her voice has regained its levelness and when Dave looks at her, it’s with the alarm of a child who has realized the person whose hand it is holding is not their mother. She realizes that even though his eyes are soaking her up, pinning her down on those silver salt DINA4 pages in his mind, he doesn’t want to know what dress she’s wearing tonight. Doesn’t want to know the way she holds her wineglass or how her hand strays towards her belt, to the ivory grip of her needles. Doesn’t want to know her at all.

She’d be lying if she said she didn’t feel the same way.

He follows nevertheless when she settles back onto the sofa and nods after a long second. The sound of faeces and fatality stills in the long bow of his head. He looks so much like the templar he always aspired to be, and in a brief lapse in sentimentality, she lays a hand against the curve of his neck. He breathes, shivery. They wait.

 

When he speaks, it’s with that same equilibrium he has always striven for and _oh_ , how it hurts despite herself. But she does not allow himself that pain, just as he will not allow himself to deserve that softness.

“We will. But not now.”

They wait. She doesn’t move and for once, he is equally as still.

They wait. Heartache is the privilege of the youth and they have none left to give.

**Author's Note:**

> For eighth_chiharu, nuclearwinter, madragingven, pandalei and Jess. 
> 
> Timeline:
> 
> Election day:  
> 05/11/2024
> 
> 3x11:  
> 11/11/2011(Condesce's rebranding & three movies already published, one in production, says Jake English)
> 
> First meeting:  
> 22/10/2007
> 
> Birthdays:  
> 03/12/1975 (D)  
> 04/12/1975 (R)
> 
>  
> 
> They live for the golden sand in their palms and a dust caleidoscope in a room lit with love.  
> They're afire, but they're not burning up.


End file.
